I dunno about you, but when I drive to work in the morning it’s exactly like zooming through the crazed eye of a protean god, high as shit, as they fall helplessly and perennially through some rapturously psychedelic wormhole. Yep, that’s precisely it. So when Niklas Ström rocks up with something he
If we had access to some grand compendium filled with every single emotion that videogames make us feel, it would probably waste most of its words trying to describe fun. But as a concept, fun is primitive. Fun is escape. Like a dog chasing a tennis ball or a crow sliding down a tin roof, fun is int
We all know artists and designers are practically fortune-tellers, able to pick up on future trends and styles when creating and reimagining their art. But when they put that divination talent into a strangely fitting literal manifestation, the results are breathtaking. Contemporary Magic: A Tarot D
“2015 is the year of the board game,” I told everyone I knew. I wrote it out in emails. I typed the words out in text messages. I casually said it over the phone. If friends or family wanted to get me something for my birthday, a PlayStation gift card would not do: I had a manicured Amazon wish list
There’s experimental housing, and then there’s housing created in a test tube. Rosa de Jong creates the latter. To use Zoolander terminology, these are homes for ants. There are no ants here, but the scale is appropriate for the little critters. Instead, what you have is a series of cylindrical dior
It’s almost surprising that there isn’t a giant Starbucks logo to be found among the pastel-colored environments of Caffeine shown in its first trailer. If it were made back in the ’90s, during the height of the genre it belongs to—the 3D platformer collect-a-thon—it would likely have some form of c
When asked about the origins of Star Wars at a Sundance panel earlier this year, George Lucas didn’t describe a mystical story some muse had moved him to tell. Nor did he frame his films as an epic family soap opera he was inspired to get on celluloid. Neither did he delve into the many filmic influ
Between getting an education, working full time, taking care of kids and being reminded by society to look good while doing it, the pressure of being an independent woman in this day and age can be overwhelming. Luxuries like heading to the gym or taking a jog often get put on the back burner so you
“Why Is NASA Exploring Pluto? NASA sends spacecraft to other planets because exploring space is exciting.” NASA Educational Technology Services, 2015 The Sputnik Planum, Pluto It emerges out of the ancient, cratered highland of the Viking Terra like a great lake, rippled with vast waves and sectione
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Flewn (iOS) BY GABRIEL SMETZER Arriving at a topically relevant time, Flewn is about the search for water. More specifically, it is about a whale journeying across the desert on stilts to find
There aren’t many games where the player can be a club dancer, strapped-for-cash and performing for tips in a sleazy bar. There are fewer where that bar is filled with fish people and space bears. When Star Wars Galaxies first released in 2003, it did so under the tagline “Live in the Star Wars Univ
As a young twenty-something, a small amount of my young adult life has been spent hovered around the phones of my friends, laughing as we collectively swipe right and left on Tinder. Being in a long-term committed relationship myself, I’ve never personally experienced the whims of Tinder, but its at
It’s about the language. It’s always about the language. Kommissar is a text adventure masquerading as a thriller—and that’s a good thing. You play as an officer in the Ministry of Truth. This is a plum job seeing as it went to you, a child of the elite, and not some pleb. Suffice it to say this is
I like it when videogames play peek-a-boo with me. Yes, please, treat me like a toddler. I mean it. I am not yet beyond the delight of a magic trick; a spatial sleight-of-hand. And Voi has enough of them to warrant your curiosity. This is a game in which I spent a good five minutes going back-and-fo
Yoda Stories wasn’t much more than a lightweight diversion for preteens with a propensity to hog time on the family desktop. With an overhead view, players guided a cartoonishly large-headed Luke Skywalker, ordered by Yoda to visit various planets to save his friends, collect piles of robot junk, an
I never thought a piano could emulate a human voice, but based on these songs, converted from MP3 to MIDI and then back to MP3 again, it’s possible. It sounds like someone singing while being held underwater, but it’s clear enough to decipher: the lyrics to familiar songs, rendered in hundreds of no
A word of warning. This is an article about Star Warped, a comedic CD-Rom and a comet made of raw 1997 that swung by this planet without many noticing. Parts of this summation are painfully, extraordinarily, and sickeningly 1997, so if you’re concerned about hearing a dial-up tone in your head simil
With Joy Exhibition, the enigmatic Manchester-based game artist Strangethink inverts the role he gave us in Secret Habitat. Once again, the virtual space is an art gallery, but this time we are the exhibiting artist and not the visitor. That said, we do seem to be a visitor of some kind, perhaps to
Growing up, graphic adventures were essential. Sure, I might have gone to Greg’s house to race through some Mario Kart tracks now and then, or called up Izzy if I were looking for the vicarious thrill of watching him charge the dark corridors of DOOM (I was too skittish to actually play). But at hom
If there is an infinite library of every possible permutation of basic letters and punctuation, among all the absolute nonsense and incomprehensible rambling must exist every coherent text that could ever be written. This is the basis of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Library of Babel, which is
Horizon Chase mixes old-school pixel graphics with state-of-the-art polygon video game technology to give nostalgic players the ultimate arcade experience.
That all sorts of people now play games is something of an article of faith, but definitions of “all sorts of people” vary. Inclusivity has a great deal to do with imagination; it requires you to imagine that people who are not your clones share common interests. The success or failure of communitie
In 1993, LucasArts released Star Wars: X-Wing, a space flight simulator that let the player fly as part of the Rebel Alliance in missions focused on ambushing Imperial forces and gathering intelligence. The game received near universal critical acclaim for its authenticity as both a window into the
New York artist Rachel Rossin sees beauty in an ersatz sunset. “GTA V has some of the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen and they give me a very similar experience to the sublime that I experience in ‘real life,’” she says. “This was very interesting as my show, Lossy, was about the translation
Stage One They call Hoth “the ice planet,” because that’s exactly what it is. I found that out immediately upon arriving at the Rebels’ Echo Base mere days ago. The word “Hoth” even sounds frigid, like the exhale of visible breath in winter. We’re out in the middle of nowhere on Hoth, a tiny speck o
